Image Comics releases another comic series that is much more related to the pandemic last year in The Fall the graphic novel on its first volume.
Alright, it’s time to bring out a big pile of dog shit. And this is another one of those comics which is related to the pandemic. But this comic happened in the summer where everything in the city is fallen into chaos. I can’t tell if they’re worried so much about toilet paper or why is the story even there to begin with. The comic is written and illustrated by Jared Muralt. He’s primarily self-taught, and he developed his precision and skill through the careful study of books which is anatomy, art history, and comics. He’s also the co-founder of BlackYard studio, a Swiss illustration and graphic design agency that was honored with the Bern’s Advancement Award for Design in 2009.
The front cover of the comic shows an image of the crisis between the city and the main characters, struggling to survive, one of them is holding a riffle for protection, the girl is feeding the baby with some milk, and the boy was scared as shit. On top of that, the whole image is more like the city has suffered from a nuclear explosion or Biff Tannen’s world in 1985 from Back to the Future 2 movie. So, the story starts when the heatwave is causing a lot of problems around town, there are water shortages so people can’t get enough water because of the local agriculture, serious crop failures, and insecurity of the town because people are going into another war because he U.S continuous violent altercations have pushed the country to the brink of civil war. This is mostly that I can relate in real life with the riot of George Floyd’s death and set to rampage the whole town with “Defund the Police” innuendos. The world has turned upside down, and the next day the main character’s wife got down with the virus while no one has informed him and his family. And this is where the bullshit factor began when every other human being around became so crowded during the summer heat, people get sick too easily after the exposure to the virus or the heat. But after that, his wife died, which became so dark for the family and so does the people in the city. And the rest of the story shows the whole family is struggling, then they got out of town looking somewhere to survive because the whole town was on the brink of chaos, the military and the police became corrupted, the people are starving to death and the main character’s daughter stood up the villagers and helped others along the way.
I can’t think of some other comic that is so much related to the deadly pandemic last year. No matter how much time that we’ve been on a lockdown we all managed to survive. I wish I had something encouraging to say, but there’s really nothing. I mean this story is just a massive negative situation, just a mindless brain waste. It’s a reference that’s meant to push humans out of society through death, while Donald Trump plans to exterminate every last living thing in that town. And that actually changed in this reality right now because Joe Biden is the new president, we’re getting vaccinated and humans are still playing themselves like it’s a game to survive. The art is nothing special, and I’ve seen this style a lot that relates to the people in real life. At the end of the book, Jared mentioned that drawing comics is “truly a disaster” for him because he had been struggling for making another comic called “Hellship.” Not all comic artists are struggling to finish drawing a comic series, but it seems that making that comic turned into a nightmare in hindsight for him. So back to the art, the first thing that I get to see is that he made the cityscape look so perfectly balanced, and somehow I understood what he meant that drawing comics is a nightmare because the work of making a cityscape takes a lot of time to get it right, no matter how much you see, the perspective work takes more time than having so much common sense, you’d have to be a genius to make this up or have the pictures that you took along the way for reference. I tend to do that too, taking pictures of the city for reference and doing the perspective work, line art, and coloring took a lot of time to get it right. The characters are much like real people, but there’s not much to talk about. A comic artist who created a comic for himself is truly honorable and making himself more of an independent artist than anyone would ever go for. If you rather want to read a comic that is much more relatable from last year, with clear cityscapes and landscapes as well as the depressing story in comic book history, then this is for you.
Newsdesk